Josplay today announced a content partnership with Sony Music Entertainment (SME) that will bring a significant portion of SME’s catalog to Josplay listeners worldwide – including recordings distributed through The Orchard and the complete catalogs of Lusafrica and Africa Nostra, acquired by Sony Music France and Sony Music Publishing France in 2025.

Together, Lusafrica and Africa Nostra comprise over 4,000 titles spanning more than three decades of Lusophone and African music, including complete works of Cesária Évora – the Cape Verdean Morna legend whose barefoot performances and Grammy-winning voice introduced an entire continent’s emotional register to the world – alongside recordings from Bonga, Boubacar Traoré, and Lura, representing a Lusophone African tradition of rare depth and reach. The partnership also makes a broad range of recordings from Sony Music’s global roster available on Josplay, delivered in part through The Orchard, whose dedicated infrastructure across South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya has built one of the most geographically and culturally comprehensive African music distribution networks in the industry.

For the African diaspora, music is not background noise. It is identity, memory, and community. Music is a living thread connecting listeners to home across time zones, borders, and generations. Josplay was founded on the belief that this relationship deserves more than a genre tag in a general-purpose streaming app. African music is not a subset of world music. It is a world of music, a statement that shapes every product and partnership decision the company makes.

“This partnership deepens the catalog available on Josplay while reinforcing why we built this platform in the first place. African music is not one thing – it is Juju and Gnawa, Morna and Amapiano, Afrohouse and Tishoumaren. Our listeners know this. They live it. Every feature we build, and every partnership we announce, is in service of that truth.” – George Ogala, COO, Josplay.

To mark the partnership, Josplay will expand access to Frames, the platform’s culturally grounded listening experience designed for how Afrocentric audiences actually use music. Unlike static playlists, Frames lets listeners anchor their most music-supported daily activities – commuting, focusing, unwinding, gathering – with seed songs, albums, or artists that reflect their own cultural taste. The system builds a dynamic, time-modulated listening session around that seed, using a user-controlled discovery mix that stays within personal parameters while introducing new music each time. A Nigerian listener might anchor a focus session in Juju; a Moroccan in Gnawa; a Cape Verdean in Morna. Frames does not flatten those differences – it is built around them.

This cultural specificity is what Josplay brings to the Sony Music partnership. Cesária Évora’s discography gains new meaning when it surfaces through the lens of who is actually listening, and why. The catalog is vast. The context is Josplay’s.

Built to celebrate the richness and diversity of African culture, Josplay focuses on culturally grounded discovery experiences that connect audiences with authentic African music and storytelling. The platform has hosted the Artist Rise Fund, conducted town halls across West Africa, and secured content partnerships that reflect its commitment to first-classing African music and African listeners.

A cover photo for the depiction of the Josplay Music and Stories App. It is one of the many used for this purpose.

Josplay partners Sony Music Entertainment to expand African music discovery

A cover photo for the depiction of the Josplay Music and Stories App. It is one of the many used for this purpose.

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